TM: The Oankali try to rescue and “cure” humanity of its destructive impulses. But Butler is also predicting a conversation about consent that we’re starting to have as a culture only now, in 2016. As far as relevance goes, our technology is catching up to the premise from Swedish researchers editing healthy DNA to a New York fertility doctor who claims to have created an embryo using 3 genetic parents. Actually the fully trilogy in one handy book. Gemma Webster: I’m also working from a used copy. When I finally read it, I was more excited over it than any recently published speculative fiction I can remember. I know it’s a revered classic in the sci-fi canon, but I couldn’t find it in any of our local bookstores. Theodore McCombs: Dawn is now almost thirty years old. Unbound contributors Theodore McCombs and Gemma Webster here take a look at Dawn in the first of three Xenogenesis appreciations.

But there is a price: the new Earth will be home only to the new human-Oankali hybrid race, while the old, pure humanity will effectively end.

The Oankali-a grotesque, tentacled race with a biological talent (and innate drive) for genetic engineering-promise Lilith they mean to restore the human race back to Earth. (The trilogy was reissued as Lilith's Brood in 2000.) Dawn opens with humanity having all but destroyed itself in nuclear war one survivor, Lilith, awakens on a spaceship, a captive, patient, and ward of the alien Oankali. In 1987, Octavia Butler published Dawn, the first book of her Xenogenesis trilogy.

Dawn xenogenesis